


adrenaline

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Kavinsky is a content warning, M/M, POV Second Person, References to Domestic Violence, They're All Jealous And It's A Mess, car crash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-17
Updated: 2016-04-17
Packaged: 2018-06-02 18:24:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6577516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sight of you behind the wheel of Kavinsky’s Mitsubishi is doing complicated things to Ronan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	adrenaline

**Author's Note:**

> Written for an anon on tumblr, for the prompt 'Adam/Kavinsky, broken glass'. It's a good excuse to do more dreampack Adam, haha
> 
> Thanks to [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid), who is wise and beautiful and really good at beta reading.

The fight had built like a thunderstorm, pressure and inevitability mounting until they cracked the world open. Someone – a family friend, a ‘concerned’ neighbour – had told your father who your friends are these days. Like most of Henrietta, your father knows who Kavinsky is – _you’re running with that fucking criminal?_ \- and has been personally wronged by him – _tearing up the roads when hardworking people are trying to sleep_ – and has opinions on associating with him – _you better stop hanging around that animal_. He’d punctuated his point. Several times.

Your legs complete the mechanical motion to drive your bike forwards, fully automated, muscle memory the only thing steering you. Henrietta is out-of-focus around you as you stare at your handlebars, moving steadily towards nothing in particular. There’s a heavy sheet of clouds hanging overhead, and the sun is slinking down behind them with no fanfare.

There is a nebula unfurling over your face, dark and expansive. Your fists had curled fierce into your side, and if it had been anyone else, _anyone else_ , then you could have shown them who Adam Parrish is. But you don’t get to define yourself to your father, and so you don’t get to defend yourself to your father. The bike shudders, a jolt in your motion, and you force yourself to swallow the memory.

A car tears past you, an insolent, iridescent violet machine that makes the road shimmer in its wake. You duck your head against the exhaust, your calloused fingers curling a little tighter on the handlebars. More things for _one day_. Your cheek throbs, and exhaustion winds its way through you, trying to find a part of you that’s still receptive to it. There’s nothing, just the regular tick of your wheels and the ache that makes up Adam Parrish these days.

You know where you’re going, through a mess of group texts that you didn’t have the money to reply to. A crude loop of unused Henrietta backroads repurposed as a rough dirt track for racing, an almost friendly event considering it’s barely dusk on a weekday. It’s a party no one expected you to attend, your shifts and fatigue as regular as Kavinsky’s blackouts, but they won’t care that you show up anyway. Even if you don’t have a car to play with, you can enjoy the noise.

Your body manages to steer the bike to the right road without requiring any of the high-level input that your wrung out brain can’t currently provide. You pause at the intersection, knowing you’re crossing some invisible barrier from Henrietta into Kavinsky’s world. The throb in your cheek poisons every other thought in your head, and you know this kind of transgression is exactly what your father hit you for, and you know you’re crossing anyway. _Good_ , snarls the part of you that wants more distance. The rest of you, the part that wants somewhere _better_ and not just somewhere _else_ , just stays quiet and traces the outline of your bruise with rough fingers.

Two cars rip around a corner a hundred metres down the road. You watch the billowing clouds of dirt they toss up as they race forwards, shredding the road beneath tyres that were not built for this kind of terrain but are going to tackle it anyway. You cover your eyes as grit sprays up in their wake, and then they’re gone, dust settling over the track and the fields and you as they hurtle around the next corner. You cross the road.

The ‘track’ wraps around two fields, and you follow the music to the party in the centre of them, walking your bike through the long grass. Twenty cars sit among the dead grasses, bright and gleaming like beetles in the last of the daylight. Someone other than Kavinsky is in charge of the music because it’s not to his taste, something frantic and pleading spat out in a language you think might be Portuguese. You wish you didn’t know the nuances of Kavinsky’s taste in music; you wonder how long it will be before he melts the offending car’s stereo.

There’s only forty-odd people staggered between the cars, and nothing’s even on fire. You catch familiar voices shouting out numbers, sums jumbling meaninglessly together in your head until you work out they’re betting on the race. It’s not hard to follow the progress of the race; from the field in the centre, you can spot the billowing dust at any position, and the more pugilistic gamblers in the crowd are trying to adjust their wager every hundred meters.

As you approach the group, you see Skov launch himself at someone who fine-tuned their bet too much, his fist crashing into their jaw. You stumble, holding yourself deathly still as your breath slows to nothing, your new bruises throbbing in time to the impact. But Swan pulls Skov back, and the surrounding boys laugh, low and cruel and unconcerned, and your heart nervously resumes beating. The thought slides into your mind, like a viper, _maybe you shouldn’t have come_ _here tonight_. You rebel against yourself. If any of _these_ people hit you, you can hit back. The scabs on your knuckles itch, reluctant or ready, brittle anticipation.

“Parrish,” Kavinsky calls, because even strung-out and wasted, Kavinsky knows how to keep an eye on his little corner of hell. He slides across the hood of a Peugeot to meet you, diesel stains on his white wife-beater and an awful, crooked grin focused on your bruises. “You’ve been playing with someone else?”

The thunder of the cars passing drowns out your response, but his grin widens at the shapes your lips make. “It doesn’t matter,” you tell him once they’re past. But your inflection is wrong; it gives away the agitation you’re usually better at burying, it offers too much of a glimpse at the restless, shifting anger you came here to drown. Kavinsky knows too much about you as it is, and his smile is bone-white against the oncoming night.

“Poor thing, Parrish,” he says, drifting closer, tone casual like he’s not aware of how he’s crowding you up between two cars. You’re waiting for him to mention your father, your cracked knuckles ready to slam into his gut. But he doesn’t; worse, he leans in, breath sour, hands sliding up your sides. “So you came _here_.”

There wasn’t anywhere else for you to go, but you don’t need to say that and sound so pitiful. He’s a well-honed predator, he knows how to sniff out need, he knows what it takes to drive you to him. You’re backed up against someone’s empty car, your spine following the curve of the panel and the handle digging into your back. Kavinsky’s hands crawl over you and you breathe out through your nose, trying to sort through what you want. There are so many thousands of things that you _want_ , white noise that makes it so hard to pick out the things you can  _have_. 

You knock his hands away from your face when he reaches for your bruise, and he laughs like he expects it. He lets you shove him back, and the space between cars is tighter than you realised, it takes nothing for you to close the distance and then you’re the one with him pinned. He lets you crash into him, a tidal wave trying to tear something back out to sea with you, your kiss a ravenous, awful thing. He doesn’t stop touching you, hooking fingers in between your ribs, a relentless dig that’s not grounding so much as caging, and he doesn’t taste any better the longer you kiss him. None of it matters; Kavinsky has gotten instant gratification down to a science.

 His hips rock against yours, and you finally get a shot of what you came for - off-hand affection, power, something careless and easy and insincere. Tension shifts around inside you, some new, taut reluctance appearing for everything that eases, but it’s always like that with him. Your fingers work their way through Kavinsky’s hair, pulling harder than you’d like, hard enough to earn another grind of his hips. He starts on your neck, biting and kissing and making a mess of you, and your head sinks down until it’s resting on the car behind him. You feel like you’ve found something to surrender to.

The rest of the party is a universe away, but not so far that you can't still hear the anxious pulse of the music, not so far that when someone shouts, "You can't be fucking serious, Lynch," it doesn't reach you. Kavinsky's attention ticks away, head lifting from your shoulder, and you know you've lost him. Everyone loses to Lynch these days.

You back up so Kavinsky can pass you, because what would be the _point_ of looking pathetic enough to try and keep him, and watch as he hauls himself back between the cars to find Lynch. Resentment stirs in you, bitter and uneasy, and you know the parts of you still burning under your stinging, purpling skin are not satisfied. If only you could care little enough to disappear into pills or powders, maybe you’d relax like the rest of them. But you don’t think that low of yourself yet. You follow Kavinsky.

Whatever fight Lynch started is over by the time you reach him, him nursing his jaw and Skov wiping at the blood streaking from his nose. Kavinsky sneers, strides forward with a, “You starting shit with my boys, Lynch?” and leaves you to watch with the rest of the crowd. You have ceased to exist, a candle consumed by the light of Lynch's sun, and you tell yourself it shouldn't sting, because it's _Kavinsky_ , but it still does. 

“Your boys are the ones with the problem,” Lynch replies. He shakes out his knuckles, still spattered with Skov's blood, and grins something savage. He’s here by himself, and you feel the curious stir that he’s here for something, the same way you are. His eyes find yours through the choppy beams of the headlights illuminating the field, and they narrow but he doesn’t look away; there’s hunger for something, for danger or the forbidden or you, and you don’t understand it.

Kavinsky doesn’t either, because he follows Lynch’s line of sight and then smacks him hard in the arm. “You’re wasting your time if you want to fuck with _Parrish_ , he never plays.”

You actively defend your right to never play. You retaliate, but you don’t instigate, you hold yourself apart, you flit around the edges of danger and only tease association with criminals and you get punished for it all the same. Something heavy turns over inside you, rejection and need colliding to create a terrible conclusion. Your bright, hopeful future is impossibly distant, your pulse is still throbbing in your beaten cheek, and self-preservation seems like an obstacle to you ever, ever feeling better than you do now.

You say, “I’ll race.”

Kavinsky and Lynch both stare at you. So does everyone else who knows you. The voice of a very buzzed Swan calls out, “You don’t have a fucking _car_ , Parrish.”

You can see the conflict on Kavinsky’s face, just for a second, before the part of him that never sleeps snaps into control and his grin is as bright as a floodlight. “ _Fuck_ yes,” he crows, delighted, “You want to do a lap, you can take my fucking Mitsu. It’s about time you got your dick wet.”

He claps you on the back, and you stagger after him to the side of the track. The Evo is already coated brown with Henrietta dust, as drab as the rest of you, but the colour’s misleading, distracting from the fierce combustion waiting under the hood. You slide into the driver’s seat, and Kavinsky slaps the side of the car, still viciously pleased by your participation.

You steer over the crushed grass of the field to wait on the road, and even at such a low speed you can feel the power at your disposal, the ravenous thrum of the machine around you waiting for you to floor it and give it a chance to show off. Anticipation hums up from the seat to rattle your teeth, and you flex your fingers, ready to take what Kavinsky wouldn’t give you.

Lynch’s BMW pulls up beside you on the road, sleek and plain compared to every other decorated machine waiting around the field. Your cars wait, headlights cutting out the path ahead, and you catch Lynch looking at you through the windows. The sight of you behind the wheel of Kavinsky’s Mitsubishi is doing complicated things to him.

“Fucking _go_ ,” someone on the side lines shouts, and the BMW roars beside you as you flatten the Mitsubishi’s accelerator. It bolts underneath you, throwing you forward, and you think _yes._ Who you are outside the car no longer matters nearly as much who you are inside it, the road devoured by the Evo’s grille as your whole world narrows to speed and motion the single second you’re living in.

The BMW’s inching ahead of you, and you know from the races you’ve been a passenger for that Lynch is a good driver, better than Kavinsky, certainly better than you. You didn’t think you’d care about winning, but you do; the glory of ruling a car like this is licking at your inhibitions, irresistible. Something you can control, something everyone else can see you conquer with. You slide around the track’s first corner, milliseconds behind Lynch and the dust he kicks up.

You haven’t driven much, and you’ve never driven _fast_ , not like this. Fear rallies alongside adrenaline with each of your frantic heartbeats. Lynch takes the second corner too wide, and you claw a few precious inches back on him. He’s used to driving on strips; you’re not used to driving at all. Years of biking down highways is boiling up in you, bracing yourself against the gusts and exhausts of every machine passing you, and the howl of the Evo around you is a retroactive victory. On the third corner, you secure your lead.

You can’t believe you’re doing this, and you can’t believe you’re winning, and you think you’re going to swallow your tongue, your nerves electric currents searing through you. The track ahead is empty, it’s yours, and finally, _finally_ , you’re going to win something.

But the last corner approaches faster than you expected. Your foot fumbles on the brake pedal, hits it too late. The Evo starts to fishtail, and you panic, wrestle with the wheel, watch the fences and tree at the end of the road hurtle towards you, unflinching obstacles.

There is one single second before you crash and you spend it with the certainty of impact. Death is one meter and one collision away, the closest it’s ever been, and everything in you is replaced with cold regret. You think, _what the fuck am I doing_ , and then you run out of road.

You are thrown forward and jolted back, head spared from smashing into the dash as the seatbelt tries to decapitate you. There is a _crunch_ , and it fills your world soundly. Then, the distant sound of depressed, Portuguese rap, and the cheer of a bloodthirsty, delighted crowd. You try to feel any injuries, but your ears are ringing, your brain is rattling inside your skull, the passenger side door is pressed up against you with all the force of a tree behind it and broken glass is scattered over you like glitter.

Through the fractured windshield, you can see Lynch abandoning his BMW thirty feet ahead and charging back towards you.

Someone else reaches you first. “Holy fucking _shit_ , Parrish,” Kavinsky says, and you don’t think you’ve ever seen him so happy. Behind him, Lynch stops running. Kavinsky tries the door, and when that doesn’t work, knocks out the rest of the glass from your shattered window. You’re still dizzy from the impact, a loose bag of blood and bones, and it’s all you can do to duck your head against it. You manage to unbuckle your seatbelt as Kavinsky hooks his arms under your shoulder and hauls you out the broken window. His arms get scraped bloody with scraps of glass. He doesn’t stop grinning.

You don’t throw up onto the road, but it’s a near thing. Kavinsky slaps you on the back again. Air is elusive as you try to swallow it down in gulps. Your breathing is ragged. Your everything is ragged. Even keeled over on the road, your head feels like it’s still going forwards, hurtling unstoppably up towards a trunk. Your body keeps wincing at the impact. The bruise you’ll get where the seatbelt met your neck is going to make the mark on your cheek look like a smudge of ink.

“Hey,” Kavinsky says, and he’s dragging you upright by the back of your shirt, even though you’re staggering just trying to stand still. “Look, you’re _basically_ fucking unharmed, whiplash is nothing, stop freaking out. Go get something to drink and calm down.”

You wobble off the track to the grass, and Jiang slaps you on the shoulder, and Proko gets you a beer, and every three seconds your ears fill with a _crunch_. You think _too far_. Kavinsky might think it’s hilarious, but he flirts with death as badly as he flirts with Lynch and every day he’s alive is like a tiny miracle. And today you’ve learned something about yourself, which is how badly you don’t want to die. You sink to the ground and wind your fingers into the dead grass of the field, like it could possibly anchor you. _Too far_.

Lynch comes to find you, kneels down beside you in the grass, says, “Hey.” He sounds like he thinks he’s responsible for something. You’re not sure you’ve got the energy to tell him that he’s not. “You alright?”

“Fine,” you lie. He looks angry, but you only ever see him angry, and you can’t decipher it.

“You’ve only got a bike, right? You want a ride home?”

The only thing worse for you than being here would be home, trapped with your father and your mother and all the questions that will come from the marks on your aching neck. Even though the roar of the cars on the track makes you shudder, there’s nowhere else for you to be. “I’m fine,” you tell him again. He shifts, furiously unhappy, but that’s not your problem. He leaves.

You hear Kavinsky yell, “ _Lynch_ ,” across the field, and the BMW’s engine spitting his response.

Your beer sits untouched between your hands, and you lose track of how many hours pass as you sit still and try to tell your brain that you did not actually die. No one bothers prying the Mitsubishi off the tree, and races continue around it, an endless loop of thunder that drowns out all the aches in you. By the time Kavinsky drops onto the grass beside you, you don’t want anything at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought, if you want to tell me here or on [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/)!


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